Writing for the New York Times Saturday, columnist Frank Rich parrots the reverberations of the insular Manhattan liberal echo-chamber by claiming that he — who has never been to a tea party, never had a conversation with a tea partier, exudes deep disdain for the “parochial” brood, etc. — has somehow tapped into the secret inner machinations of the movement. That is, these folks, who he claims are so generally stupid they “don’t recognize their own small scale mimicry of Kristallnacht” (by the way, it takes a special caliber of columnist to point out baseless references to Nazis and in the same sentence use a Nazi comparison himself. Mr. Rich, Bravo!) nonetheless, these people are so intimately tuned into the latest demographic information from the Population Reference Bureau that they are bunkering down for the Great Minority Takeover. The Tea Party movement is not about government, you fools! It’s about racist whites mobilizing against a future where minorities are far too numerous. In short, the drug warriors, the poverty warriors, none of the legions of various social battle fronts have anything on the frothing, tribalistic race warrior.

This narrative is ubiquitous both in television and print media. When conservatives encounter it, it is typically waved off as a sophisticated “Alinsky tactic” to shut down of debate. While this is true, the depth of this phenomenon has not been sufficiently characterized. Few reference the exploitation of racial tension as a method to bring down the “establishment” popular among New Left radicals. To various degrees, this practice persists up to the present and widely influences the cultural Left. It is highly effective at impugning both mainstream and conservative America and, in fact, is as easy as one-two-”racist!”  

Once in the heart of the 1960s New Left, our Editor-in-chief David Horowitz witnessed first hand the marriage of radicalism and race. During his tenure at Ramparts, one of the most widely circulated leftist publications, the marxist, militant Black Panthers became a darling of the New Left. Frequently trumpeted as the “vanguard” of revolution, the Black Panthers rejected the nonviolent, integrationist message of Martin Luther King Jr. and instead, aligned with radicals with whom they shared obvious political affinities.  Horowitz recounts (Radical Son):

When [Huey] Newton founded the Panthers in 1966, he was a young street felon attending Oakland’s Merritt College. On campus, he came into contact with [Bob] Sheer and other white student radicals, and became familiar with their theories that criminals like him were “primitive rebels” who intuitively grasped the socialist idea that property is theft.

…Newton became a leader of the new generation of activists, who were turning their backs on the nonviolent, integrationism of Martin Luther King…led by Stokeley Carmichael and the Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, they identified themselves as “black” and called for “Black Power,” reserving the word Negro for “Uncle Toms,” among whom they included Martin Luther King (whom the Panthers referred to as Martin Luther Coon).

Leftist radicals were particularly attracted to groups like the Black Panthers because of their propensity for violent rebellion and mystique as oppressed victims of capitalism par excellence.

While no one would publicly say so, it was the Panthers’ violent image that provided their real attraction to the New Left. Blacks would seek liberation, Malcolm said, through the ‘ballot or the bullet,’ but no radical believed the System could be changed by peaceful means.

…The quest for authenticity preoccupied white radicals like myself who made up the bulk of the Movement, and was the key to the Pathers’ charisma. In a seminal article titled “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer had cast America’s blacks as Rousseau’s “nobel savages,” representatives of humanity in its pristine state. These were the “oppressed” of the radical imagination. The Panthers’ roots in the ghetto were the primal symbol of social injustice. Their will to violence was the mark of their revolutionary spirit.

Thus, sparked a conflagration against “racist Amerika,” popular on college campuses and among some of the most influential New Left activists. It was simultaneously an indictment of the capitalistic-centered status quo, and one of its many perceived injustices, namely, societal racism. Yet, in its selective alliance with the black revolutionary movement, the merger was never so much in the spirit of racial equality, but in galvanizing the uprising of the “oppressed victims of capitalism,” those willing and able to bring down “the System” from within.

This sentiment has never left the Left which continues to view minorities as “the oppressed.” Ethnic interest groups are frequently courted by leftists, if they aren’t already operated by them.  Even as recent as this month, mass campus protests on March 4th (primarily in California) were orchestrated and/or sponsored by a cornucopia of a Who’s Who in radical organizations. Faced with tuition hikes and budget cuts, protests were widely couched in terms of racial discrimination. Posters depicted the familiar clenched fist of socialist uprising with messages like, “Protect Your ¡Education!” to incite Latino students to the cause.

During the event, Latinos and “students of color” protested in respective contingencies to underscore the racial element of budgetary cuts (presumably, because they would disproportionately affect poorer minority students). The protest was primarily in the name of public education, but incorporated protests against “systemic racism” (endemic in a place like Berkeley, CA). An unfortunate incident, a so-called “Compton Cookout” held by UC San Diego frats during Black History Month (incredibly offensive even by fraternity standards) inflamed students within the UC system. Thus, race and socialist demands — Free Education! Education is a RIGHT, and the like — melded freely and poured out onto the streets of Berkeley. Rancor over “UC racism” added convenient fervor to an event organized under the more pedestrian pretext of fiscal tightening.

We have all become students of color now,

declared one professor of urban studies at the event.

Conflating economics with race is a perfect way to confer the status of a morally unassailable argument. Racism is a thoroughly indefensible position. By characterizing the status quo as racist and claiming that “progress” is toward socialism, then clearly, if you’re not with socialism, you’re with the racists. Nobody said it was logical, but this is essentially what the argument is. The key to its success, why so many perfectly mainstream people cannot help but be sympathetic to it, is that in our country racial inequalities often tract economic inequalities. So, if you’re not correcting the economics, you are thereby not correcting the racial disparities, which everyone has an interest in seeing changed.

Liberals and conservatives will depart on how to address this issue. Liberals are more “direct relief” types and champion like policies. Conservatives believe such relief generally does more harm than good and will never truly solve the problem because it only assuages the symptoms. On the other hand, leftists believe that the whole structure is fundamentally unjust and must be transformed into something more closely resembling the socialism of Western Europe, Scandinavia and beyond. But this will never happen unless the oppressed are spurred to action. Like class warfare, exploiting racial tensions continues to be an effective cudgel against moderates and conservatives in its capacity to demonize the opposition and incite ethnic minorities. Different elements of the Left will employ it for different reasons, some just to impugn the Right, some actually believe that racism is enormously more prevalent and see it everywhere, but the history behind the “Racist!” phenomenon is illuminating for more reasons than one: Fomenting racial divisiveness for political gain is a long standing tradition which permeates the cultural Left. Where it exists, it must be identified as a reprehensible, as much as an intimidating practice as it is.

___

Nichole Hungerford is Social Media Director and Contributor to Smart Girl Nation. You can follow her work at Obama Porn or via Twitter @ObamaPorn.

Leon Trotsky

Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me: Part I

Hell on Earth: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part II

Boring From Within: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part III

To Have And Have Not: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IV

Post-modern leftism: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part V

Means and Ends One: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI

For anti-capitalist radicals — as indeed for zealots generally — the ends justify the means. It has ever been so — for the Jacobins, the Communists, the fascists and now the post-modern Alinsky/Obama left. And that is because of the very nature of those ends as radicals conceive them. A world without poverty, war, racism, or “sexism” is so noble, so perfect in contrast to everything that has preceded it — that it would be criminal not to deceive, lie, and even murder in order to advance or protect the cause. As Nietzsche once observed: “Idealism kills.”

When your aim is to overthrow the existing order including its moral rules, you must be willing to break the rules to do it. Therefore, to be a radical is to be an outlaw. During the Sixties, I had a conversation that veered unexpectedly into this territory. It was with SDS radical Tom Hayden about the non-political Sixties counter-culture. Hayden was contemptuous of Hippies — because they were non-political — but he was convinced their drug culture had a political use. Once you get someone to break the law, Hayden said, they are on their way to becoming revolutionaries.

In the Sixties, radicals generally shared Hayden’s idea and were proud to do so. The Sixties political culture embraced criminal icons like John Dillinger and films which celebrated outlaws like The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde. Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book was a manifesto of the creed, and Obama friend and Weatherman leader Bernadine Dohrn‘s tribute to psychopath Charlie Manson was its extreme expression.

This romance is reflected in radicals’ affinity for criminals and their causes at home and abroad, in their apologetics for terrorists and solidarity movements with totalitarians, in their “Free Huey” and “Free Mumia” and “Free Leonard Peltier” causes, and their glamorizing of Hip Hop thugs like Tupac Shakur, and in Saul Alinsky’s early attraction to Al Capone’s enforcer Frank Nitti. The Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm gave this kinship an academic imprimatur in a book he wrote about the mafia and other Sicilian criminals whom he described as “primitive rebels” — in other words revolutionaries avant la lettre. Its text included a chapter on “Social Bandits” who in his description are avatars of “social justice” –their activity “little more than endemic peasant protest against oppression and poverty” (p.5 Google edition) and the claim that the activity of the “mob” was “always directed against the rich” — in other words okay. (p.7) The French radical Pierre-Joseph Proudhon — whom a jealous Marx infamously referred to as the “Jewish nigger” — gave license to radicals to steal and destroy in what has become socialism’s most famous epigraph: “Property is Theft.” In reality, of course, it is socialism that is theft.

Another reason why radicals believe that their goals justify criminal means, and also why they can be relied on to lie and steal and, in the right context, either commit actual murder or justify murders when committed by their political friends, is because in their own minds they are engaged in a war for “social justice” and other noble ends, and are opposed by an enemy who is an implacable oppressor, in fact, the embodiment of evil. In war, when one’s own survival is at stake, any means can seem both attractive and necessary. Radicals think of themselves as soldiers in a war to save mankind — and to save the planet. If that is your responsibility and aim, quibbling over the means to accomplish those objectives can easily come to seem immoral itself.

Rules for Radicals is about tactics in a war where the enemy is the “Haves” who are defending the status quo and all its manifold evils. It is a war that pits noble, planet-saving radicals against the entire social, moral and legal order. The radical goal is saving mankind, and the arguments of his critics are naturally that his means are unpatriotic, subversive, deceptive, violent, illegal and immoral.

Consequently, to brace his radical disciples against their opposition and supply them with self-justifying rationales, Alinsky devotes an entire chapter to the problem of “Means and Ends” — of how a radical can justify breaking the moral order in order to achieve radical ends (pp. 24 et seq). In his handling, there are 11 rules for radicals to explain how radical ends justify radical means. The chapter is explicitly an effort to answer those liberals who refuse to join the radical cause saying “I agree with your ends but not your means.”

Alinsky begins the chapter by telling us that the very question “does the end justify the means” as stated is “meaningless.” The real question is “does this particular end justify this particular means?”

The whole discourse about means and ends that follows, was made forty years earlier in 1938 in a famous (and far more intelligent) pamphlet by the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. It was titled Their Morals and Ours and was written to justify the bloody crimes of his comrades (and himself). Summing up his case, Trotsky wrote: “Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are in conflict; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.” In other words, there is no such thing as morality, only class interests. What is right and just is what serves the proletariat and its revolutionary war against the “Haves.” Continuing the argument, what is moral and right is what serves the revolutionary party which embodies the revolutionary cause. Alinsky cannot state the principle in these terms because as we know that the revolutionary cause of the Bolsheviks led to the slaughter of 40 million people and the most oppressive tyranny mankind had ever seen. Bloody and immoral means led to a bloody and immoral end.

Because of this unpleasant history, Alinsky cannot refer his disciples to Trotsky but has to restate the argument in terms that don’t appear related to Marxism but are. The art of radical politics, as Alinsky has already told us, is the art of deception. It is the art of convincing potential opponents and recruits that you are working within the system and its rules when you are actually working to undermine the system and destroy its moral order. In practice and conception, if not precisely in presentation, Alinsky’s rules about means and ends, and Trotsky’s Machiavellian principles, are the same.

While reading the description of these rules that follows, bear in mind that the current president of the United States worked for three years as a community organizer for a subsidiary of the Gamaliel Foundation, an institution guided by the Alinsky principles, and that his mentor as a community organizer was John McKnight, an Alinsky disciple and radical professor at Northwestern University who, in an article he wrote at the time, referred to Alinsky as “the master,” and “a community organizing giant.”.

We begin with Alinsky’s introduction: “Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem.” Translation: He is not going to worry about the legality or morality of his actions, only their practical consequences. “He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.” But, you might ask, what if the means are immoral, criminal, and evil. If as a crusader for a just future you proceed by criminal and immoral means, won’t that corrupt your movement and your cause and affect — or simply undermine — the outcome you are trying to achieve? (And how could this even be a question after Marxists killed 100 million of their own citizens in peacetime in the 20th century, justifying their every step of the way by the noble end — social justice, a liberated future — which they were proposing to achieve?)

Like other radicals, Alinsky ignores the bloody failures of the radical past. Instead he answers the question in this cynical and dismissive fashion: “To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process … he who fears corruption fears life.” In other words, things couldn’t be worse than they are (but the Bolsheviks showed that they could). Since life is corrupt — everyone is corrupt — corruption is just the ordinary business of life; if you commit heinous crimes, you’re just doing to others what they’re already doing to you. This is the self-justification of radicals (just listen to Billy Ayers defend his acts of terrorism during the Vietnam War.) Is it any wonder that Alinsky looked to Al Capone’s enforcer for instruction? Perhaps “post-modern radicalism” is the wrong term for the Alinsky crowd. “Chicago radicalism” might be more apt.

In action, continues Alinsky, “one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. [Therefore,] the choice must always be for the latter.” This arrogant rationale puts one in mind of Dostoyevsky’s famously statement that “if there is no God, then everything is permitted.” If there is no moral law, what is forbidden? And what is the “the good of mankind” that Alinsky’s radicals are supposed to put before conscience, and who decides it? This is the very path trod by Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, steeped in the blood of innocents for “the good of mankind.”

Alinsky sums up his advice, laid out in the pages that follow in religious terms. This is an unintended self-revelation, revealing the way radicals actually see themselves — which is as social redeemers. This self-conception as mankind’s saviors reflects perfectly the advice given by Lucifer — “the first radical known to man” to the hapless first humans: Eat of this tree and “you shall be as gods.” Here are Alinsky’s words: “Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal salvation has a peculiar conception of ‘personal salvation’; he doesn’t care enough for people to be ‘corrupted’ for them.” Mass salvation.

Note the scare quotes Alinsky puts around the verb “corrupted.” This prophet does not believe in a morality apart from radical cause. As one of Alinsky’s radical heroes, the sadistic dictator Fidel Castro, infamously put it: “Within the revolution everything is possible; outside the revolution nothing is possible.” The revolution — the radical cause — is the way, the truth and the life.

And the Series’ Conclusion, Part 8: The Nazi Option